Reviews/Music; Making Connections of Sight and Sound

By BERNARD HOLLAND

Published: December 12, 1989

Friday night's concert at Florence Gould Hall invited the audience to hear pictures and see sounds. Here the New York Chamber Ensemble offered a series of pieces inspired by paintings, or at least the idea of painting.

It asked an interesting question. Is there a single sense of beauty common to all art forms, one that transforms itself to fit the various senses? Or do the ears, the eyes and the nose represent esthetic kingdoms of their own, each with its own language and values, and each with its insuperable walls?

Lest one miss the point of all this, appropriate paintings were flashed on a screen behind the players as they performed, creating what might be called surtitles for the eye.

One tried hard to make the right connections. The alternative was to risk accusation of being tone-blind or color-deaf. It was not an easy task, given the various ways these composers chose to suture the two arts together. Mr. Somers articulated Picasso's angular Cubism with angular phrases, his blue period with dolefulness and one gaunt dual portrait with a duet of English horn and clarinet. Mr. Bourland's Jackson Pollock pieces were filled with independent instrumental voices, each wiggling on its own course. ''Collage'' pieced together different metric fragments.

Set against these aural puns were the Griffes pieces, with their gentle, pastoral impressions, and the Feldman, whose tiny murmurs seemed at quite a distance from the busy Willem de Kooning paintings being projected simultaneously. Indeed, sight and sound did not so much meet at this concert as simply stand in amiable proximity to each other.

It took a third party to bring them together - a composition's title or an explanatory program note. Music explains art only with help from the outside. Claude Debussy understood this when he gave his piano Preludes extravagant pictorial names but then put them at the end of the printed score, not the beginning.

The New York Chamber Ensemble consists of the Chester String Quartet and about a dozen other musicians (one group of which calls itself Hexagon). They are deftly directed by Stephen Rogers Radcliffe, who is presumably responsible for this kind of unusual and interesting programming idea. That its premise was untenable made the evening no less interesting.